Early Thanksgiving

We went to Sacramento yesterday, Veteran’s Day, for the annual visit to our son’s neurosurgeon. We’ve got it down to a routine:

1) bring the film from last year’s CAT (computer-aided tomography: spelling it out adds little to my understanding) scan;
2) go to radiology for a new scan;
3) develop the prints and carry them to the neurosurgeon’s office.

Our doctor, Sam, and his colleague, Michael, are two of the most skilled pediatric neurosurgeons in Northern California. They have been treating our son’s case since he was born twelve years ago with an aneurysm, a distended blood vessel, in his brain. The aneurysm bled and caused a build-up of cerebrospinal fluid in his brain---the life-threatening condition known as hydrocephalus [from the Greek words for “water” and “head”].

After a series of operations and twists and turns in diagnoses and treatment options which I won’t detail here given that the average attention span of the Internet reader is less than two minutes, suffice it to say that our son is alive (miracle 1) and is not severely handicapped (miracle 2). When I observe first-hand our advances in medicine, when I consider how much better off we are at the beginning of the 21st century than was the richest man in the world at the beginning of the 20th, every day feels like Thanksgiving

Below: pictures of some of Sam and Mike's grateful patients.